The White Sox dipped into the free-agent pool this week with their first significant move of the offseason, agreeing to terms with righty Mike Clevinger on a reported one-year, $12 million deal. For the soon-to-be-32 Clevinger, it represents an opportunity to reestablish himself as a reliable mid-rotation starter after struggling to do so with San Diego in his return from his second Tommy John surgery in 2022. For the White Sox, it means adding a relative unknown with some upside to a talented and extremely right-handed rotation featuring 2022 AL Cy Young finalist Dylan Cease, a pair of veterans in the possible last years of their contracts in Lance Lynn and Lucas Giolito, and a 26-year-old Michael Kopech, who is trying to stay healthy for a full season himself after an early-career Tommy John surgery of his own.

The move comes as a bit of a surprise this early in the offseason, with much of the starting pitcher market yet to be sorted out. The reported $12 million value of the contract is a chunk of change higher than both our crowdsourcing and Ben Clemens predicted at $8 and $9 million, respectively. There’s a lot of starting pitching out there in November, including a handful of veterans coming off strong years that might be available for a one-year contract at or around $12 million. Corey Kluber contributed a productive season in Tampa this year, as did Michael Wacha in Boston, though he may require a second year of commitment. Andrew Heaney has generated enough buzz early that he might push that budget, but he’s available. Johnny Cueto was the second most valuable pitcher on these very same White Sox, with 2.4 WAR over 158.1 IP, but at age 36 would likely come at a similarly reasonable rate. So why did Chicago instead jump the market for Clevinger? Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 free-agent market is crawling with former league MVPs. The recently crowned Aaron Judge is coming off one of the best position player seasons in recent memory. Multiple contenders have already checked in with 2020 AL winner José Abreu, who at age 35 is still quite a productive hitter. The 2011 AL MVP, Justin Verlander, is about to turn 40 but is nonetheless one of the top pitching targets available after a unanimous third Cy Young Award season. Andrew McCutchen seems to have played a thousand careers since his MVP win in 2013 and is on the lookout for a new home after playing out a one-year deal in Milwaukee. And then there’s the youngest of the bunch, 27-year-old Cody Bellinger, who was non-tendered by the Dodgers last Friday nearly three years to the day after his crowning as the 2019 NL MVP. The centerfielder was projected by MLB Trade Rumors to earn around $18.1 million in his final arbitration year in 2023; instead, with a high ceiling at a relatively low cost, he’ll be the archetype of a bounceback candidate wherever he lands.

Bellinger’s struggles since his MVP campaign have been well documented. After a mediocre follow-up season in the COVID-shortened 2020, his production dropped dramatically in ’21, as he hit .165/.240/.302 and was one of 16 players to finish with -1.0 WAR. He’s battled a string of injuries in that period, too, including multiple shoulder dislocations and a fractured left fibula, that led to missed time and a steep decline in contact quality and production; his wOBA fell from .414 in 2019 to .337 in ’20 to .237 in ’21. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s either a great or a terrible winter to be a shortstop. On the one hand, four shortstops – Carlos Correa, Trea Turner, Xander Bogaerts, and Dansby Swanson – figure to be among the offseason’s top free agent earners, making up half of the top eight in FanGraphs’ 2023 Top 50. On the other hand, those four have each other as competition, and differentiating oneself among the All-Star shortstops of four of the last six World Series champions can’t be easy. All four showed just what they’re capable of in 2022. Turner, Bogaerts, and Swanson each finished in the top 15 in position player WAR, separated by a grand total of 0.3, and Correa – if he raised any doubts by getting off to a slow start in Minnesota – slashed .370/.419/.613 over his last 29 games to finish first among all shortstops with a 140 wRC+. These players aren’t interchangeable by any means, and Swanson doesn’t have the offensive pedigree of the other three, but the teams showing interest in one are more than likely to at least take a look at the others. A year after Corey Seager, Trevor Story, Javier Báez, and Correa were among the top free agents available, this winter’s shortstop class is even more loaded.

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On Monday, MLB unveiled the three highest vote-getters for its four major end-of-season awards, including the three top-voted rookies in each league. Steven Kwan, Julio Rodríguez, and Adley Rutschman made the cut from a strong American League pool including playoff double-MVP Jeremy Peña, 2022 preseason No. 2 prospect Bobby Witt Jr., and rotation standouts from across the circuit (George Kirby, Reid Detmers, and Joe Ryan). In the National League, teammates Spencer Strider and Michael Harris II underscored Atlanta’s bright future with quick breakouts. Inaugural Gold Glove utilityman Brendan Donovan complemented his defensive versatility with a 129 wRC+ to earn an underdog spot among the finalists over Jake McCarthy, Seiya Suzuki, and others.

The winners won’t be revealed until this coming Monday, but this week’s announcement was a sort of celebration of a rookie class that lived up to expectations and then some. Award season is about recognition of individual achievement over the past regular season, but in the case of the Rookie of the Year, it also feels like a prospective look at the careers that might be awaiting us. With the talent exhibited by this year’s class, particularly the position players, it seems we have a lot to look forward to. Read the rest of this entry »

As FanGraphs’ own Jay Jaffe noted last week in his piece on the dominance of relief pitching this postseason, the average time to play nine innings is down by 15 minutes in the playoffs after dropping by an average of seven minutes in the regular season. As Jay wrote, there are a handful of factors likely contributing to shorter game times in 2022, ranging from reliever usage and rule changes such as the three batter minimum, to technological adjustments like PitchCom, to changes in gameplay and dwindling offensive production. Regardless of the reason, it’s a shift that warrants exploration. League leadership has spent the better part of the last decade focused on reducing the length of its games; the commissioner talked about improving baseball’s pace of play on his very first day of the job. While games are still longer than three hours on average this season, the seven-minute dip after a record-long average game in 2021 marks the most precipitous single-year drop in the Divisional Era, and that sounds like it should be music to the ears of Rob Manfred and Co.

But the league’s objective with respect to time of game is more nuanced than just shaving off minutes at any expense. Yes, Major League Baseball is interested in games moving faster, which has led to rule changes like the upcoming pitch clock in 2023 and the existing three batter minimum for relievers. Teams used 3.30 relievers per game in the regular season in 2022, down from 3.43 in ’21, and fewer pitching changes mean less wasted time. But it is also interested in maintaining some level of offensive action – hence the introduction of the designated hitter in the National League this year, and bans on the shift set to come along with the pitch clock next year. Some improvements in time of game can come at the expense of offensive action, and vice versa, and titrating the levels of each that make for the best product is a delicate balance. In 2022, we did see offense trend down to concerning levels, but with a closer look, there is also some reason for optimism with regards to finding this balance. Read the rest of this entry »

In this year’s regular season, games took a pretty pronounced step away from three true outcomes hitting. Home runs dropped from 3.3% of plate appearances in 2021 to 2.9%, walks from 8.7% to 8.2%, and strikeouts — this one in part thanks to replacing nearly 5,000 pitcher plate appearances with designated hitters — fell from 23.2% to 22.4%. All told, the percentage of plate appearances winding up in one of these results dropped 1.7 percentage points, from 35.1% to 33.4% — the most profound drop since 1988.

There are a lot of theories as to why this could be happening, from the universal designated hitter to more changes in the balls to humidors, but the fact is, after this figure dropped nearly one percentage point from the pandemic-shortened 2020 season to ’21, this year marks the second of a league-wide trend away from the trio. Which makes it all the more fun that when the Phillies and Astros take the field in Houston tonight for Game 1 of the World Series, it will be National League home run and strikeout champion Kyle Schwarber digging in to lead off the Fall Classic.

In his first season in Philadelphia this year, Schwarber was as much of a three true outcomes hitter as there was. No other player this season finished in the 90th percentile or above in home run rate and walk rate and in the bottom 10th in strikeout rate. That isn’t to say there aren’t other players in that mold; indeed, there are many. Giancarlo Stanton and Eugenio Suárez hit 31 home runs apiece and both finished in the bottom 10% in strikeout rate but landed in the second decile in walk rate. Max Muncy, who led off a World Series in 2018, leans pretty heavily in that direction. Matt Chapman, Daniel Vogelbach, and Joey Gallo all fit the bill to some degree, the latter most prototypically in previous seasons. But in 2022, nobody took it to the extreme that Schwarber did; he hit more home runs than anyone other than Aaron Judge, led the majors with 200 strikeouts, and finished sixth with 86 walks. While about a third of PA league-wide ended in one of the true outcomes, just about half — 49.6% — of Schwarber’s did. Read the rest of this entry »

Runs have been hard to come by this postseason. Through Sunday’s games, pitchers have done an extremely effective job of limiting opposing offenses, holding hitters to a collective .213/.279/.361 batting line and a .283 wOBA. They’ve struck out 26.7% of batters faced, which would rank as the highest postseason rate of this strikeout-friendly era despite regular-season rates dropping nearly a full percentage point this year. The expected stats back up the offensive struggles – or, perhaps more appropriately, the pitching achievements — of playoff teams so far. Batters’ .220 xBA, .287 xOBP, .372 xSLG, and .292 xwOBA would all be the lowest of the Statcast era. Pitching staffs have managed to limit home runs to 3.1% of plate appearances – the lowest rate since 2018 – and held run production to 3.72 runs per team-game, over half a run lower than in the regular season. It remains incredibly difficult to hit a baseball.

And yet despite that harsh run environment, the Houston Astros have thrived, sweeping the Mariners and the Yankees en route to their fourth World Series appearance in six years. All but one of their wins have been by a margin of one or two runs, but as close as they might have come, Houston’s opponents have yet to figure out how to beat a team that seems to be doing just about everything right. Since Justin Verlander allowed six runs over four innings in an uncharacteristically bad ALDS Game 1 start, the Astros pitching staff has allowed just nine earned runs in 68.0 innings (a 1.19 ERA), while their offense has outscored their opponents 31-18 through seven games. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve come to expect the characteristic intensity of the MLB postseason. The league’s best teams meeting head to head with everything on the line is bound to generate some memorable storylines, and two weeks in, the 2022 playoffs have been no exception. The top four seeds in the NL — the Dodgers, Braves, Cardinals, and Mets — were upset by the Padres and Phillies, leading to heated debate on the merits of a playoff format that remains a crapshoot. The Mariners ended their drought and beat the Blue Jays on the road to earn a playoff game in front of their long-deserving home fans before falling in the ALDS to Yordan Alvarez and, eventually, Jeremy Peña. The Yankees and Guardians traded blows for five games in the only Division Series to go the distance.

What is not a given in the playoffs is that, independent of the stakes of the game, the games themselves will be competitive. With the level of talent on the field, we expect to see some worthy contention, but it is an inevitability of the sport — maybe an inevitability of sports in general — that some games end up as back-and-forth nailbiters and others as, well, something like 8–2 in the fourth inning. The results may be the same, but baseball is, after all, about the fan experience, and it’s a heck of a lot more fun to watch when you don’t know who’s going to win. This postseason, we’ve been lucky to get more of the former than the latter. Read the rest of this entry »

A game that figured to be a pitcher’s duel and felt like a 11–10 outburst was neither. Instead, 20 hits, five home runs, and somehow just eight total runs later, it was a classic, tense, tooth-and-nail affair in which neither team enjoyed the comfort of a win probability over 75% until the conclusion of the seventh inning, and even then, it hardly felt that way. At the end, the Padres punched back and evened the score against their big brother/daddy, beating the 111-win Dodgers, 5–3.

After Los Angeles took Game 1 on Tuesday, Clayton Kershaw met Yu Darvish in Game 2 on Wednesday night in a matchup of two of the league’s finest of the moment and the last decade. But both had their hands full with deeply talented lineups. Darvish was missing velocity on most of his arsenal, issued two walks, and surrendered three home runs, but spread the damage out enough to leave with a lead, albeit after just 15 outs. Kershaw kept the Dodgers in the game but also lasted just five innings, though he did manage to pass Justin Verlander and reclaim, for now, the all-time career postseason strikeout record with 213. Read the rest of this entry »

In a race for the National League batting title that ended up coming down to the final day, Jeff McNeil emerged victorious, hitting .465 (20-for-43) in his last 11 games of the season (he was a late defensive replacement Wednesday, but didn’t hit) to finish at .326, one point higher than Freddie Freeman for the highest in the majors. McNeil’s final two weeks put a bow on a career year. He finished with 5.9 WAR, 16th among major league hitters and the most by any Mets primary second baseman save Edgardo Alfonzo, who set the mark with 5.9 WAR in 1999 and then bested it with 6.4 in 2000 (of course, McNeil also spent a good chunk of time in the outfield). He started the All-Star Game at Dodger Stadium, some 100 miles from his southern California home, and now his Mets are headed to his first career postseason. It’s a good year to be Jeff McNeil.

McNeil has generated his value with a set of skills very different from those of your typical modern All-Star or 5.9-WAR player. In a home run era, he’s been as far from a power hitter as an All-Star gets. He finished 2022 with nine home runs, including two in his final three games, making him just the third player in the last decade to amass as many as 5.5 WAR without clearing the fence 10 times. He hit 23 home runs in 2019, the homer-happiest season in major league history, but even with that outlier included, he’s still gone deep in just 2.3% of his big league plate appearances.

In truth, your 2022 batting champion is among the softest-hitting big leaguers in the game, ranking in the 12th percentile in average exit velocity, the eighth percentile in hard-hit percentage, and the seventh percentile in barrel percentage. Just 13 of his 477 batted balls this season registered as barrels: Read the rest of this entry »